Music Streaming

Square, Jack Dorsey’s digital payments company, is acquiring a majority ownership stake in the music streaming service TIDAL. Jay-Z, who bought Tidal in 2015 for $56 million, will join Square’s board of directors.

Jack Dorsey tweeted: "Square is acquiring a majority ownership stake in TIDAL through a new joint venture, with the original artists becoming the second largest group of shareholders, and JAY-Z joining the Square board. Why would a music streaming company and a financial services company join forces?!"

"I said from the beginning that TIDAL was about more than just streaming music, and six years later, it has remained a platform that supports artists at every point in their careers," said Jay-Z.

Audio streaming application Spotify is rolling out a new feature that will let users filter their liked songs by mood and genre. The feature will be introduced only in its mobile apps, with no desktop version at this stage.

These filters will change as users like new songs. For now, the feature will only be rolling out to English-speaking markets, including the US, Canada, and the UK. It will be rolled out over the coming weeks to Free and Premium listeners on Android and IOS devices.

Over the next few days, Spotify will launch its service in 85 new markets across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, as announced at its online event, "Stream On". The company will also add support to 36 new languages on the platform.

The streaming platform stated, "Our dedication to international artists and listeners is unwavering. Working closely with local creators and partners, we’ll deliver a Spotify experience that meets the unique needs of each market, with scaled language translations and specialized payment formats. These 80+ markets represent more than 1 billion people—potential Spotify listeners who have yet to tap into the power of our platform."

The patent, which was filed in 2018 and granted on 12 January, would allow the streaming giant to "make observations" about a user's environment and emotions using speech recognition technology.

Spotify has implemented a new feature for iOS and Android phones. Users can now search for song lyrics and Spotify will automatically show the matching songs. The new feature is called "Lyrics match" and according to Spotify designer Lin Wang has been shipped to the phones already.